Category: Christian Marclay

As a student in art school, Christian Marclay, found more ‘energy’ in the music scene and got involved in music DJing more so than art, which he found comparatively more ‘stoic’ at the time, pioneering the technique of scratching, of using the turn-table as an instrument, in concocting strange sounds that fans enjoyed along with the rhythms of their dance music.

Lately his interests have returned to the visual arts, taking the Golden Lion Award for best artist at the 2011 Venice Biennale and making strange video/films to be exhibited in museums worldwide. What he does has in fact stayed the same; just as in the days of DJing for Hip-hop events, he takes source material, be it sounds or music from an LP, footage from a classic Hollywood movie, or video footage walking the streets of London, material that should be discarded and mashes it up, taking certain common attributes, linking them together and transforming it into something else in the process.

The Clock (2010) Christian Marclay

His most famous, notorious work, The Clock (2010) a 24-hour film made up of thousands of scenes from Hollywood films spliced together, new and old, in which any clock or watch scene showing the time, would correspond to the real time at the display venue, poses the following existential question: what if one could tell the time by watching a movie? Would the movie turn into a clock? Even though the plot had to be slowed down by having the time pass in the movie at the same rate as real time, but by matching the two together, the line between illusion and reality is blurred.